The Amarillo native — who’ll return home for a 10 p.m. Friday show at Golden Light Cantina, 2906 S.W. Sixth Ave. — said the collapse of the record industry has its upside.

“I’ve kind of started rethinking the whole record-making process,” said Ely, the genre-smashing guitarist and singer known both as a solo star and as a member of The Flatlanders.

“It used to be, when I was recording with the labels ... we thought of an album as somewhere between 10 and 20 songs,” Ely said. “Now, there’s no such thing as a record. Everything’s online.

“It really doesn’t make any sense to be (putting together) 10 songs if they don’t relate to each other,” he said. “I think most records, people would have been good to stop at three (songs) instead of adding eight throwaway songs to make a record.”

So now, Ely is working on two or three different projects — one, a collection of four songs inspired by the tragedies along the Mexican-American border; another, a grouping of about 40 songs in preliminary form, just featuring Ely singing and playing guitar.

“They’re early sketches of songs before they’re arranged,” he said. “I’ll come back and maybe do arrangements on them later, but I’d like people to see them in their barest form, you know.

“These are the things that I keep myself occupied with,” he said. “I’ve always worked at a studio at my house (in Austin), so I can kinda work anytime I want to.”

Ely said he finds this process works with his strengths as a writer, too.

“I always hated in the past for somebody to say, ‘It’s time to make a record, now go and write it,’” he said. “I would be staring at a piece of paper and saying, now I guess I have to write something. What do you do? Thumb through an encyclopedia and write about what’s in there?”

Ely — who started his musical career playing violin in the school orchestra at Avondale Elementary — said he’d rather “write about things that are happening in real time in my life and record them at the time when I was most inspired and not just trying to write for writing’s sake.”

Writing, he said, “takes a lot of hard work.”

“You either have to live it and breath it, or else do something to make this come about,” he said. “You don’t just sit and it magically happens.”